JULIEN BONET - Climate Skeptic

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2024-25

Signed, dated and edition numbered by the artist on a separate label.

Climate skeptics

Three giant blocks of ice, stacked on top of each other, enclose a body. They slowly melt, dripping into a puddle forming in the hot desert sand. Only the bare legs betray the humanity beneath the frozen monument.

Climate Skeptic is a picture of paradox: someone persevering in the midst of thawing, wrapped in evidence they refuse to acknowledge. The figure wears their own melting like a shield—or like a denial. It's a silent accusation, but also a portrait of our collective turmoil: between knowledge and action, between urgency and repression.

Historically, the motif is reminiscent of apotropaic masks, which were once intended to protect against the forces of nature. But here the logic shifts: The mask no longer protects; it isolates—a fragile monument of doubt in the face of undeniable reality.

Bonet's work makes tangible how climate crisis and denial are intertwined: the more visible the change, the more strongly some cling to the illusion of immutability. Climate skepticism thus becomes a mythical image of a present in which our survival depends on how we deal with the truth.

Part of the ongoing series Masquerades – contemporary myths between fear, ritual and collective memory.